London Design Festival 2012: Brompton Design District

Brompton Design District boasts a thriving community of independent creative businesses who come together for events like London Design Festival and offer some of the grass roots events that the festival wouldn’t be complete without.

Squint have taken up residence at 1 North Terrace in the heart of Brompton and created what they describe as their “flagship emporium.” It was the explosion of color and pattern that you can always rely on founder Lisa Whatmough for.

4 Cromwell Place was a new venue for 2012; a 19th century double-fronted townhouse curated by Jane Withers. The first exhibition on entering the building was Vera Chapter Two, an interdisciplinary installation orchestrated by Kirsty Minns & Érika Muller, in which designers responded to the photo above and then creative writers responded to the resulting designs.

Even the lighting was part of the show, with this installation, winding its way up the stairs, designed by Martino Gamper.

Designmarketo were providing fun half-way up the stairs – a roll of the dice could win you a bag of goodies – randomly collected up from around their studio.

Upstairs, Out of Print explored the relationship between digital and printed media. A live printing installation by James Cuddy, Roma Levin, Danilo Di Cuia and Goldsmith’s BA Design students, it used an electronic app to randomly combine news headlines, which were than hand printed onto posters – with often amusing results.

We Feel Fine sets out to explore the human emotions behind the digital revolution. Every day they collect statements that contain “I feel” or “I’m feeling” from blogs across the world, and categorize them according to sentiment – resulting in a database of millions of emotional statements.

Dissatisfied with computers as a way to engage with the Internet, they have created a series of other ways to do so. This machine lets you choose between “happy” and “sad” and prints an emotion accordingly. The one pictured says: “Happy: On Tuesday 5th June 2012 someone said: ‘I feel like a fraud when I try to muster up some happy sh*t to say about my future.'” There are clearly still some issues with the categorization, but an interesting concept nonetheless.

Katie Treggiden is a design writer with almost 20 years' experience in the creative industries. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee of the Leach Pottery. As well as travelling all over the world discovering new design as Editor at Large for Design Milk, she also contributes to publications such as the Guardian, Crafts Magazine, Elle Decoration and Monocle24. She has written four books and launched an award-winning design blog and independent print magazine – her latest book is Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom. She is currently studying for an MSt in the History of Design at the University of Oxford.